Giesecke & Devrient (G&D) has announced that its Brazilian subsidiary, GD Burti, is the first manufacturer of national security documents to meet the security requirements for the new Brazilian eID cards. The high-security Registry of Civil Identity (RIC) cards have been granted certification by Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia da Informação, Brazil’s foremost IT authority. GD Burti has already delivered more than one million RIC cards as part of an initial pilot project.

RIC cards store biometric data and will make it easier for Brazilian nationals to visit other Mercosur treaty states. The new RIC card meets the Brazilian government’s standards for its national ID cards – which must contain an eID application as well as a match-on-card solution for fingerprints – thus enabling unambiguous identification of individuals. According to G&D state authorities such as the police can scan a person’s fingerprints using a portable device and compare them with those stored on the person’s ID card. Additional security is ensured by Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which guarantees the authenticity of the data stored on the chip. The RIC card enables each Brazilian citizen to be registered under a single number that is valid nationwide. This eliminates one of the biggest security risks of the country’s current ID documents, which require multiple registrations in the various federal states under different registration numbers.

The RIC card is a hybrid card containing both contact and contactless modules. The latter comprises a travel application that complies with the standards of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and will facilitate travel between the Mercosur treaty states. Both a photographic image of the ID holder and the holder’s fingerprints are stored on the RIC card.

G&D says a variety of optical and electrical security features protect the RIC card against forgery and enable citizens to verify a card’s authenticity quickly. These include integrated kinegrams, guilloches and other optical elements such as microtext or rainbow print.

According to G&D the standards of Brazil’s top IT authority, Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia da Informação, are comparable with FIPS, the Federal Information Processing Standard formulated by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. It says: “From June 2012, the ITI certification will be mandatory in Brazil for all new national eID documents with PKI signature functionality. GD Burti already meets the prerequisites for taking part in the upcoming tender for the manufacture and delivery of Brazil’s national ID cards. The company has already delivered more than one million RIC cards to Brazilian authority Casa da Moeda do Brasil as part of a pilot project. G&D’s subsidiary in Brazil invested heavily in the upgrade of its production facility last year, putting it in a position to mass-produce ID documents.”